ELPC Part 1: A fertile research question

When it comes to learning something new, just listening to an expert is usually not enough. Nor is passively reading. Usually we need to do something, to actively construct the knowledge ourselves, from a number of different sources and for a particular purpose (often to teach or explain it to someone else).
This seems to be [...]

The walled city: Josh Part 1

I want to start this post with Josh.
Josh is the boy who has agreed to be a part of a small research project I’ve decided to do. The idea is to trial a task I’m going to be setting for my postgraduate preservice teachers in a university unit called ‘Literacy Across the Curriculum’. I described [...]

A broken sleep

Last night I woke up at 3.17am. No, it must have been earlier than that, because I’d already been awake for while before I finally looked at the clock. Awake and worrying away at the thought that soon I’ll be teaching a unit without enough preparation.
It’s a familiar worry that has disturbed my sleep, in [...]

Searching for meaning in our English classrooms

Michael Umphrey has recently suggested that we are witnessing a large-scale, slow motion holocaust as students succumb to a sense of meaninglessness.
I have a half dozen preoccupations as a teacher–things that I keep thinking about. One of them is all the boys I have who believe what they have been taught–that all morality is a [...]